il trial it is impossible to know) whether she has qualified me to
shine in any one.'

It was inevitable that one whose district as an exciseman reached far
and wide could not regularly attend to ploughing, sowing, and reaping,
and the farm was very often left to the care of servants. Dr. Currie
appears to count it as a reproach that his farm no longer occupied the
principal part of his care or his thoughts. Yet it could not have been
otherwise. Burns after having undertaken a duty would attend to it
religiously, and we know that he pursued his work throughout his ten
parishes diligently, faithfully, and with unvarying punctuality. Others
have bemoaned that those frequent Excise excursions led the poet into
temptation, that he was being continually assailed by the sin that so
easily beset him. Let it be admitted frankly that the temptations to
social excess were great; is it not all the more creditable to Burns
that he did not sink under those temptations and become the besotted
wreck conventional biography has attempted to make him? If those who
raise this plaint mean to insinuate that Burns became a confirmed toper,
then they are assuredly wrong; if they be only drawing attention to the
fact that drinking was too common in Scotland at that time, then they
are attacking not the poet but the social customs of his day. It would
be easy if we were to accept 'the general impression of the place,' and
go by the tale of gossip, to show that Burns was demoralised by his
duties as a gauger, and sank into a state of maudlin intemperance. But
ascertained fact and the testimony of unimpeachable authority are at
variance with the voice of gossip. 'So much the worse for fact,'
biography would seem to have said, and gaily sped on the work of
defamation. We only require to forget Allan Cunningham's _Personal
Sketch of the Poet_, the letters from Mr. Findlater and Mr. Gray, and to
close our eyes to the excellence of the poetry of this period, in order
to see Burns on the downgrade, and to preach grand moral lessons from
the text of a wasted life.

But, after all, 'facts are chiels that winna ding,' and we must take
them into account, however they may baulk us of grand opportunities of
plashing in watery sentiment. Speaking of the poet's biographers, Mr.
Findlater remarks that they have tried to outdo one another in heaping
obloquy on his name; they have made his convivial habits, habitual
drunkenness; his wit and humour, impiety; his